Upbeat Philip Hammond says UK will get a good Brexit deal and ‘doesn’t recognise’ EU’s £50bn divorce bill

AN UPBEAT Philip Hammond said he was confident the UK would get a good deal from the EU as Theresa May gets ready to formally trigger Brexit.

The Prime Minister has written a letter which will be handed to the European Council president Donald Tusk in Brussels this lunchtime, beginning a two-year countdown on our exit.

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Speaking as the Cabinet met to discuss the contents of the six-page missive, the Chancellor was bullish that there would be a positive outcome from the negotiations.

And he said that the “didn’t recognise” the £50billion so-called ‘divorce bill’ which senior EU figures insist we must pay to quit the trading bloc.

But Mr Hammond did suggest that in the talks we “can't have our cake and eat it”, in a subtle knock to Boris Johnson’s ambitious notions of any potential deal.

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Ministers gathered in Downing Street from 8am around the same table Mrs May was pictured signing off on the Article 50 letter last night.

Mr Hammond said he was confident the UK would negotiate a customs arrangement with the EU that would allow for borders to be as frictionless as possible after Brexit.

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Speaking to the BBC he said: "Everybody in the EU and the UK is going to go into this negotiation looking to protect their own interests.

"It is not in the interests of anybody on the continent of Europe to have lines of trucks. It is not in the interests of the millions of EU workers who spend their days producing goods to be sold in the UK.”

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He told Radio 4’s Today programme: "It is not in the interests of French farmers who produce fresh produce coming into the UK every day that there are lines of trucks.

“So I am very confident that we will not get an outcome that is a worst case outcome for everybody. That would be ridiculous."

But as speculation grows about whether the Government is prepared for the sort of deal it is able to negotiate. Mr Hammond reassured Brits they have plans for “day one after we leave” in a “huge variety of outcomes”.